Three years ago, Memphis had Ja Morant, Desmond Bane, and Jaren Jackson Jr. They were a top-3 team in the Western Conference. Young, ascending, legitimately frightening. I know we’re supposed to be talking about Portland now, about Damian Lillard’s strange new situation, about what Scoot Henderson does with a ball-dominant 26-year-old arriving from the other side of the country. But before we get there, we should spend a moment with what just happened in Memphis. Because what happened in Memphis is a disaster, and someone should be held responsible for it.

https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/2071693198171226335

Summer 2025: Bane goes to Orlando for four first-round picks, Cole Anthony, and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. February 2026: Jaren Jackson Jr. goes to Utah at the trade deadline. June 29, 2026: Morant goes to Portland for Jerami Grant and Kris Murray. Three stars. One offseason and change. Gone.

This is not a rebuild. A rebuild implies you had a plan. This is a controlled demolition that got out of hand — except there’s no evidence anyone was in control.

The easy narrative is that Morant made this inevitable. The suspensions were real: eight games in 2023 for a first gun video, then a 25-game ban to open 2023-24 for the second one. His image never fully recovered, and his on-court numbers bore the weight of whatever was happening off it. This past season he played 20 games, shot 41 percent from the field and 23 percent from three, and watched his season end January 21 with a UCL elbow sprain. Those are ugly facts.

But ugly facts were still manageable — and what front offices never want to admit is that they were manageable. The suspension windows were finite. The injury was a single season. What Memphis actually did with those windows — the decisions they made while Morant was either suspended or hurt — is where the real story lives, and it is not flattering.

In March 2025, with the team sitting 44-29 and fifth in the West with nine games left, they fired Taylor Jenkins. The winningest coach in franchise history. The stated reason, per ESPN, was to “optimize Ja Morant” — Morant reportedly hated the offense, and the front office blinked. GM Zach Kleiman issued a statement about “urgency” and “clarity of direction” that managed to say nothing while implying everything. The team went from mid-pack in pick-and-roll usage to dead last. That is your clarity of direction.

After the suspensions, teammates were reportedly told to give Morant space. Between roster turnover and a coaching staff he didn’t connect with, he was increasingly isolated from anyone who understood him. The front office had a problem and responded by removing every human buffer between the problem and the exit. You can dress that up in org-speak all you want — the result was a superstar who felt alone in his own building.

Then came the OKC sweep in the 2025 first round, and whatever was left of the Memphis window closed. Bane went first, then Jaren, then Morant. Four playoff appearances with this core. One series win. And now a press release about Jerami Grant and the future.

The Grizzlies won one playoff series in four tries with a top-3 Western Conference core and the answer was to dismantle it rather than interrogate the decisions that kept them from going further. That’s the institutional failure. Not the suspensions — those happened. Not the injuries — those happen too. The failure is that Memphis never built the infrastructure around those three young stars to survive either. There was no depth plan, no culture scaffolding, no contingency for what would happen when the faces of the franchise needed more than basketball from the people around them.

Every front office has a plan for when their stars arrive. Very few have a plan for when those same stars stop being who they were. Memphis didn’t. Now they have Jerami Grant and a lot of explaining to do.

For what comes next for the Grizzlies, the front office is already talking future assets. For the full accounting of how his trade value had cratered to the point where Jerami Grant was the best offer on the table, start there. The window didn’t close on its own. Someone left it open in the rain until the whole frame rotted.